Dubai: Dubai Police helped a 15-year-old Arab boy reunite with his father after seven years, police said on Monday.

The boy came to Dubai recently searching for his father who had divorced his mother when the boy was a year old.

The boy, armed with just a picture of his father and his old mobile phone number that was switched off, came to the Al Rashidiya police station and told the police that he had even gone to the old area where they once lived at to look for his father but could not find him.

The boy told the police that his parents had divorced when he was a year old and that he had since been staying with his Moroccan-origin mother in Morocco. Seven years ago, she had brought the boy along with her to Dubai to seek a settlement with her ex-husband and ask him to keep their son with him as she wanted to get married again. But the boy’s father turned down her request and so the mother took the boy to his maternal grandmother in Morocco while she moved to Jordan after she got remarried.

Reem Al Ameri, from the victim support programme in Dubai Police, said that the boy came to Dubai to look for his father and had very little money with him.

Police managed to locate his father, who is from Comoros Island, and still staying in Dubai. A reunion between father and son took place.

“I spoke with the father and convinced him to look after his son, so he came to the station and met his boy,” said Al Ameri. “It was an emotional scene when the two hugged each other. The boy was 8 years old when the father last saw him,” Al Ameri added.

The son stayed with his father for 10 days and his father gave him money and a ticket to Morocco to return to his grandmother, but he promised the boy that he would bring him back to Dubai when he completed his schooling.

“The boy was happy [at the prospect of coming here to live with his father]. He even said he was thinking of becoming a policeman [when he grew up],” Al Ameri said.

Dubai Police, she said, is always looking to make people happy and the victim support programme helps in any way it can.

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